Replacement Rasterizers
Here are a pair of replacements for the D3D and OpenGL rasterizers. The main aim was to fix the bugs that exist in the current rasterizers, principally for D3D:

Not all polygons being drawn at high loads, resulting in cars being incompletely drawn on the starting grid.

Text corruption.

Menu flickering.

Driving screen showing as small box in top left corner or similar with recent NVidia drivers.

and for OpenGL:

Visible polygon lines in the sky with some drivers.

While I've done my best to make the rasterizers perform well, there's no particularly good reason why they should be quicker than the originals - they may be, but it's also possible they might be slower. It's worth trying both, and it's also worth fiddling around with the settings, particularly the ones that relate to draw method and Z buffer. A brief rundown of all the options is included in the readme.

To get it looking optimal the most important thing is the LODBias option, you may need a different setting to what you've used in the past.

The main limitations compared to the originals are that windowed mode isn't currently supported, and they aren't compatible with either version of Pribluda. Hopefully AK will be able to provide a version of Pribluda that works with these at some stage in the future.

I've concentrated on making them work with recent video drivers, if you have older drivers it's possible you might need to update them. If you're using OpenGL and Nvidia you need to disable triple buffering in the Nvidia control panel otherwise you'll get screen flickering.

The installer - many thanks are due to Bernd Nowak for the installer and for support and suggestions - should create backup versions of your app.ini and core.ini, but it wouldn't hurt to make a manual backup just in case. Unfortunately the options settings are incompatible with the originals, and the original '[ Int Profile Values ]' section needs to be either removed or commented out. My two rasterizers do however share the same options, although not all settings are applicable to both. In GPL the new rasterizers show up with 'V2' in their names, and the originals are still available to be chosen as they're not overwritten.

Paul Thurston has also added support for the new rasterizers into GEM - GPU205026.zip contains the updated GEM executable which you'll need to copy to your GEM installation directory.

These rasterisers are awesome! I've been trying for ages to get my GPL installation to work with my screens native resolution (1680x1050) but didn't have any success. It wasn't until I downloaded these rasterizes that I could get this to work and it makes a HUGE difference to the quality. Thanks heaps,
Mike.

When installing the GEM update (downloaded from link) a 'Select Language' dialog box appears with nothing available in the drop down list. Clicking 'OK' button and nothing appears to happen and it just sits there. My GEM version from top left corner says 2.5.9. Is that latest version?

When installing the GEM update (downloaded from link) a 'Select Language' dialog box appears with nothing available in the drop down list. Clicking 'OK' button and nothing appears to happen and it just sits there. My GEM version from top left corner says 2.5.9. Is that latest version?

I have a problem running them under ATI4870, I am not able to run the menu in d3d mode because it flickers (it was the same with the previous version)

That's true that the new OPENGL rasterizer got rid of horizontal lines in the sky but.. I don't know what makes my track go into a shade of blue? It happens at random.... every so often the track seems to be affected, this is how it looks

The flickering happens in the old version if you use higher antialiasing settings, so you might try knocking it down a notch.. I didn't think it happened with the newer version though.

I don't know about the blue track, but it's probably something to do with the newer graphics card drivers being incompatible with Direct7 or else the 16 bit colours in GPL. For a test, try running your desktop in 16 bit.

Sure, My AA was activated but I had managed to sort it out myself yesterday evening. The game now even works under the old d3d rasterizer.

As for the openGL, with the old one I have no issues apart from the fact that the menu bitmap is corrupt. (pribluda does not work of course)

Under the new openGL everything works OK, the menu is nice, fully AA compatible expect these blueish stuff.
I doubt it is a driver related problem since I did not get any blue tint using the previous rasterizer (I used the one from GPLPS pack) I tried switching the palette to 16bit but it did not help.

I could live with d3d but I really miss AA, is there any way to have it on together with a stable menu? Even low AA settings bring flickering back.

By the way, which rasterizer is better in terms of graphics? I can't notice any particular difference...

PS. I have just downloaded the newest ATI 9-3 driver, the game stopped working under OPENGL

I do have a simular effect when running GPL with the new opengl rasterizer: it happens randomly, but if it happens, the full screen in-game pictures become disturbed by weird grafics and instable images. This si not taking place in the manues of the game, and only after the switching into the session or race mode of GPL.

I use an ATI 9600 with the new mobility radeon 9.3 drivers. If it wasn't for that, the new rast would be a great innovation for me, as it offers a smooth fps at all details and full bias with up to 7 fps more than the also new d3d rasterizer.

I tried several settings on the desktop and on the driver of my grafic device, as installed the last directx components (from March 09) but non of them seems to have any influence on this problem.

Any idea what could cause this inconvenience?

I use 2GB of RAM, running a 1,5 GHz-Pentium M on a (very clean and stable Asus-Notebook)

By the way: Dear Mr. Simpson THANK YOU VERY VERY VERY MUCH INDEED FOR YOUR MAGNIFICANT WORK ON YOUR NEW RASTERIZERS!!!

i am late. yes. but better late than never in appreciating and using Nigels pearls.

rsc being down i have no access to any longer threads with maybe a solution to my problem. short story, while d3d rasterizer works fine the opengl one doesnt.

when i set it to 32bit=0 it loads gpl but the main menu texts are blue and all other menu texts are missing entirely.
i mean entirely, no replay shown, no racemodes, no ... well no anything.

i have an ati card 9800 on that xp system. even with radlinker the lowest thing i can set anti aliasing to is 2x or standard. i tried all available gfx card settings (well, not in all combinations though obviously) and have no real clue what to do.

basically no real problem since the old rasterizers do work and the new d3d one too. just asking in case i am missing the more or less obvious to get that done.

long time ago since i went through trouble setting gpl things up, but here we go again .

when i set it to 32bit=0 it loads gpl but the main menu texts are blue and all other menu texts are missing entirely.

I don't know about the rest, but while I was developing the rasterizers my menu texts were coming out blue on a machine with an ATI card. I had a workaround for it, but discovered that when I upgraded the ATI drivers the problem went away, so I pulled the workaround out before the rasterizers were released. So new drivers may fix this problem, but I can't say for the others.